As the most famous cold cases of all time attest, the longer a case remains cold, the less likely it is to be solved
Mary Rogers
On the night of July 25, 1841, Mary Rogers, who lived in New York City, told her mother and fiance she was spending the evening visiting relatives in New Jersey. The 21-year-old left and never returned home. Three days later, her badly beaten body turned up floating in the Hudson River near Hoboken, New Jersey. No one could imagine who might have had a motive to harm Mary—other than her fiance. However, he had an airtight alibi.
Mary attracted a slew of admirers, who knew her as the “beautiful cigar girl” from her job working in a downtown cigar emporium. No one seemed to suspect a stalker might be involved in her disappearance. The only witness claiming to have seen Mary that night told a story involving an illegal abortion ring that didn’t seem to fit and couldn’t be corroborated. Within a year, the case had gone cold, and Mary’s fiance had committed suicide by overdosing on a type of opium on the very shores her body had washed up.
The whole tragic tale might have faded from history, except that author Edgar Allen Poe, who had become obsessed with this case, memorialized it in the short story The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, a sequel to his famous The Murders in the Rue Morgue. Similar to its real-life counterpart, the tale ends with the trail going hopelessly cold. Thanks to Poe’s tale of mystery, this became one of the most famous unsolved murders of its time.
Jack the Ripper
Between August and November 1888, five prostitutes turned up dead on the streets of London’s Whitechapel neighborhood. All were found within a mile of one another—two on the same night—and all had their throats slashed from left to right. The lead investigators on the case suspected the killer was left-handed. All but one had been gutted with precision, leading investigators to suspect the killer might have been trained as a butcher or surgeon.
The killer managed to commit these crimes and escape undetected, which suggested he was familiar with the rhythms of the neighborhood. The murderer, whom the press referred to as Jack the Ripper, was never identified. Perhaps Jack the Ripper died before he was able to carry out any additional murders. Or maybe his killings evolved over time, as other murders occurred in Whitechapel over the next three years bore some similarities to Jack’s work.
In either case, Jack the Ripper is now long gone, and it appears he has taken his identity with him to the grave. Of course, that doesn’t stop us from speculating as to who he might have been. At one time, there were speculations that someone from the royal family could have been Jack the Ripper. In February 2025, a study based on DNA evidence seemed to have identified Jack the Ripper, pointing to a Polish barber. But the evidence isn’t conclusive, so it seems the mystery of this famous cold case will go unsolved.
Belle Gunness
Wherever turn-of-the-20th-century Norwegian immigrant Belle Gunness went, people had a habit of turning up dead, especially well-insured people—including several of her husbands, boyfriends and children. Still, it took a quarter-century and at least 40 kills for anyone to even suspect Gunness might have been the common denominator.
But before a solid case against Gunness could be put together, her farmhouse burned to the ground. Investigators presumed her remains were inside, and with no other viable suspects, all murder cases that she was under investigation for went cold.
That’s not the only case that went cold that day. Turns out the April 28, 1908, fire was arson. Gunness’ hired hand, Ray Lamphere, was convicted of setting the fire, but he was acquitted with regard to Gunness’ resulting death. How? He convinced the jury that Gunness wasn’t dead but, rather, had hired him to start the fire to help her fake her death. As such, this famous cold case remains unsolved.
Hinterkaifeck
On March 31, 1922, five members of the Gruber family, along with their maid, were murdered at the Gruber family farm, Hinterkaifeck, in Bavaria, Germany. It was nearly a week before the massacre was discovered—due in part to the remoteness of the Hinterkaifeck farm and in part to the patriarch’s unpopularity in the community. He was known as a bully and a wife-beater and had spent a year in prison after being convicted of incest with his widowed daughter, Viktoria, who was also one of the victims.
The delay, which gave the perpetrator a significant head start in escaping, may have been a significant factor in why the case was never solved despite a lengthy investigation and the identification of at least 100 suspects.
In addition, circumstances including strange footsteps in the snow and strange noises coming from the attic, suggest the perpetrator may have been living—unknown and undetected—in the Gruber house for at least six months. That would have given the killer either ample time to meticulously plot the crime or sufficient familiarity with the property to escape undetected, even if the crime was committed impulsively.
Still another theory is that the killer was Viktoria’s husband, who wasn’t dead at all but living elsewhere under an assumed name—conveniently, since no one ever suspects a dead man of murder.
The Black Dahlia
Aspiring actress Elizabeth Short was just 22 years old when she was found murdered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles on Jan. 15, 1947. The Black Dahlia case, as it was called then, led to a lengthy investigation that included a roster of more than 150 suspects. What was lacking, however, was any hard evidence or even a remotely reliable witness.
Today, the Black Dahlia murder remains one of the oldest and most famous cold cases in Los Angeles. It’s a forensic case that stumped everyone and inspired countless books, crime series and films.
The Somerton Man
One morning in December 1948, a well-dressed, well-muscled middle-aged man was found dead on Somerton beach in Adelaide, Australia. The Somerton Man, as he became known, carried no identification, and all the labels on his clothing had been systematically removed. The only clue was a piece of paper found in one of his pockets with the words Tamam shud printed on it—Persian for “It is ended.”
The paper was traced to a book of Persian poetry found in a nearby parked car, from which the last page had been torn. Scribbled in the book was the phone number of a local woman. When questioned, she claimed she didn’t know the man. Also scribbled in the book were a few lines of cryptic text no one has ever been able to decipher.
No one ever came forward to identify the man, whom the coroner concluded had been poisoned. In 2022, a professor from the University of Adelaide claimed he had identified the Somerton Man based on DNA evidence. But this true-crime mystery, to date, is far from solved.
The fugitive case
On July 4, 1954, a 31-year-old Marilyn Sheppard was beaten to death in the Cleveland home she shared with her husband, Sam, while their 7-year-old son lay sleeping in his bedroom down the hall. Sam claimed the killer was a “bushy-haired” intruder who had also assaulted him, leaving him with serious injuries. However, the evidence didn’t support this, and jurors believed the prosecution’s theory that Sam killed Marilyn to get out of the marriage.
Sam, who was distrusted and reviled by the general public, spent 10 years in prison before the U.S. Supreme Court found excessive publicity had deprived him of a fair trial. On retrial, Sam was acquitted and spent the rest of his life trying to find Marilyn’s killer. Sam’s determination inspired the television show The Fugitive and the 1993 based-on-a-true-story film of the same name.
The “Love Me Tender” murders
On the night of Dec. 28, 1956, teenage sisters Patricia and Barbara Grimes went to a local Chicago movie theater to see the film Love Me Tender. When they never returned home, a frantic search ensued. Although the police received a number of tips, none panned out, and a month later, the girls’ bodies were discovered by the side of a nearby road. Unfortunately, their bodies yielded so few clues that investigators weren’t even able to settle on a time or cause of death.
Nevertheless, several suspects emerged, the most promising of whom was a teenage boy who confessed to killing the girls. However, since his confession was elicited illegally through a lie detector test that the law said the boy wasn’t old enough to be subjected to, he couldn’t be tried for the crime. Whether or not the boy was the killer, the case remains unsolved to this day.
The boy in the box
In February 1957, the body of a little boy, somewhere between 4 and 6 years old, was discovered in a vacant lot in Philadelphia, naked and stuffed in a bassinet box. The cause of death was multiple blows to the head, and it appeared the boy had been given a fresh haircut either immediately before or after his death.
Although authorities estimated the body might have been in the box for as long as three weeks, they were able to piece together a drawing of what the boy probably looked like while alive. Still, the drawing didn’t match the description of any missing child. Decades later, the case still remains unsolved.
Forensics solved one piece of this mystery, though. In 2022, authorities found a DNA match for the boy and identified him as Joseph Augustus Zarelli. The name was etched onto a new headstone in Philadelphia. The crime’s perpetrator, however, has never been found.
The Walker family
On Dec. 19, 1959, the four members of the Walker family were brutally murdered in their Osprey, Florida, home. Their bodies were discovered the next day. The crime scene revealed few clues beyond a bloody boot, a partial fingerprint on a tub faucet and a cellophane cigarette wrapper.
Police managed to cull 587 witnesses and/or suspects, but none panned out—not even Perry Smith and Dick Hickock. The two men were apprehended in Las Vegas a week later on suspicion of murdering another family under strikingly similar circumstances—the Clutter family of Kansas, whose massacre became the subject of Truman Capote’s true crime classic and one of the best thriller books, In Cold Blood.
While Smith and Hickock were eventually convicted of the Clutter family killings, authorities were unable to piece together a case against them with regard to the Walker case, which remains unsolved. If Smith and Hickock were involved, they have both since taken that secret with them to the grave.
The Beaumont children
On Jan. 26, 1966, Nancy Beaumont allowed her three young children, ages 9, 7 and 4, to travel unsupervised by local bus to nearby Somerton Beach in Adelaide, Australia. Since such unsupervised travel was the norm of the day, Nancy had no reason to think her children were in any danger. She was wrong. The children didn’t return home that afternoon, and a frantic search ensued.
Investigators learned the children had been interacting pleasantly (and with some level of familiarity) with a tall, blond man in his mid-30s, both at the beach and at a nearby food shop, where the man apparently gave the children money to buy meat pies.
There was some hope the mystery might be solved in 2018 after two brothers told police they had spent that January weekend in 1966 digging a hole at a factory at the request of the factory owner, Harry Phipps, who was believed to be linked to the missing children. But the site was excavated several times, and no bodies were found.
The mysterious hijacking of a flight to Seattle
On Nov. 24, 1971, as Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 took off from Portland, Oregon, its passengers had no idea the middle-aged man in a dark suit who sat near the rear of the plane—smoking a cigarette and speaking quietly to the young flight attendant taking his drink order—wasn’t just ordering a bourbon and soda. He was also telling the flight attendant that he had a bomb that he fully intended to use if his “demands” weren’t met. Those demands included $200,000 in cash (close to $1.6 million today), four parachutes, a fuel truck standing by in Seattle to refuel the plane on arrival and a second leg trip to Mexico.
Officials met the demands of the man, who was traveling under the alias Dan Cooper and has been known ever since as D.B. Cooper. He disappeared from the plane while en route to Mexico, presumably via parachute, although no one can say since the flight crew had left Cooper alone in the rear of the plane. In any event, his parachute was never found.
One of the strangest unsolved mysteries concerns the cash. The marked bills were never used, but some of the money turned up in 1980 along the banks of the Oregon branch of the Columbia River.
The FBI worked the case for 45 years, but the man known as D.B. Cooper has never been identified. The bureau surmises Cooper likely didn’t survive the parachute jump and that all of its “favorite” suspects (including Richard Floyd McCoy and Robert Rackstraw) are now dead. But the famous cold case continues to intrigue the public, with interest reviving in July 2025 after the FBI released a 398-page dossier. The files offered deeper insights and suspect profiles from the case, though none of the suspects fit the bill. Still, amateur sleuths continue to probe this famous cold case.
The Zodiac Killer
The man who called himself Zodiac apparently enjoyed taunting San Francisco police as much as he enjoyed killing. The first time Zodiac struck, on Dec. 20, 1968, he shot and killed two teens parked on a “lover’s lane.” Police approached the investigation as a standard homicide, populating their suspect list with people whom the victims knew and working the “if teens are involved, then drugs must be involved” angle.
The next time Zodiac shot at a couple in a car, he called the police himself, just in case they weren’t sharp enough to figure out these two crimes were the work of the same man—a man intent on controlling the narrative. This was also when Zodiac began contacting newspapers, offering titillating details only the actual killer would have known and threatening to up his level of violence if his letters weren’t printed. This became one of the strangest unsolved mysteries in the state of California.
Over the next two years, Zodiac claimed responsibility for 37 lives, although law enforcement was aware of only five and none after 1969. That being said, it was in November 1969 that Zodiac wrote a letter to the press proclaiming, “I shall no longer announce to anyone when I commit my murders. They shall look like routine robberies, killings of anger and a few fake accidents, etc.”
So perhaps Zodiac did continue killing, albeit with a revised modus operandi. In any case, the trail went cold, and it became one of the most famous cold cases in the country’s history. Although roughly 2,500 suspects were interviewed and a prime suspect (Arthur Leigh Allen) was identified, Zodiac’s identity remains an unsolved mystery.
The Isdal woman
On Nov. 29, 1970, the badly burned body of a woman was discovered in Norway’s Isdalen Valley. Her burns rendered her unrecognizable, she bore no identification, and the labels in her clothing had been cut out.
With 50 sleeping pills found in her stomach, the woman appeared to have died by suicide, but the plot thickened when her possessions were discovered at a nearby railway station, revealing eight fake passports, a wad of Deutschmarks and a cryptic, unsolvable note.
No one ever claimed the body, which was never connected with any missing person case. The case went cold, but a podcast on the topic, Death in Ice Valley, has inspired some listeners to do their own sleuthing. So stay tuned because this famous cold case may be heating up and may very well be solved soon.
Jimmy Hoffa
On July 30, 1975, former Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa was looking to make a comeback from his career-derailing conviction for fraud, jury tampering and bribery. Although a notorious criminal—he was a known associate of the Mafia and may have been involved in the disappearance of millions of dollars from a Teamsters’ pension fund—he had received a pardon in 1971 from President Richard Nixon.
To that end, Hoffa had arranged a meeting with Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano and Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone at a restaurant not far from Hoffa’s home in Michigan. At around 2:15 p.m., he called his wife to say he’d been stood up, and she should expect him home for dinner. But Hoffa never returned home, and the next day, his car was still in the restaurant parking lot. An investigation ensued, but (not surprisingly, given the cast of characters) turned up nothing. The case went cold, and Hoffa was declared dead in 1982.
The whereabouts of his body remain unknown, even though a group of investigators claimed that they found his body in 2023 near a baseball stadium in Milwaukee. They reached out to the FBI to dig up the site, but the case remains unsolved.
The Tylenol murders
On Sept. 29, 1982, seven people around the Chicago area died after taking Extra Strength Tylenol capsules tainted with cyanide. It quickly became apparent that it wasn’t that all Tylenol was tainted but rather these particular bottles, which appeared to have been placed randomly in drugstores.
Law enforcement helped avert further poisonings by driving around, confiscating pills and bottles and shouting into bullhorns, “Don’t take Tylenol.” (This was the pre-internet days, after all.)
At great cost, Tylenol’s manufacturer recalled all 31 million bottles throughout the nation, replaced capsules with caplets and introduced tamper-free pill-bottle caps. Despite a nationwide dragnet, several smaller-scale copycat crimes in other states and the arrest of a man who tried to use the tragedy to extort money from Tylenol, the perpetrator was never identified.
Amber Hagerman
On the afternoon of Jan. 13, 1996, a pair of siblings—9-year-old Amber Hagerman and her 5-year-old brother, Ricky—were playing, as they often did, in an abandoned grocery store parking lot in Arlington, Texas. When Ricky went home, Amber stayed to play some more. But she never returned home.
Retiree James Kevil witnessed Amber’s abduction from his own backyard. Immediately calling the police, he offered a description of Amber’s kidnapper (“a white or Hispanic male ages 25 to 40, under 6 feet tall, [with a] medium build”), but the trail quickly went cold.
Four days later, Amber’s body was discovered in a creek behind an apartment complex near the parking lot where she was last seen. The autopsy revealed she’d been kept alive for two days after her abduction. Unfortunately, it revealed little else. Interest in this famous cold case remains, but while Arlington police say they receive tips and leads every 180 days, most of them fizzle out.
The one bright light in this case is that it led to the establishment of the Amber Alert system, which alerts the public when a child has been kidnapped in the hope that they can be tracked down before they meet the same fate as Amber Hagerman.
Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls
In September 1996, West Coast–based hip-hop star Tupac Shakur, 25, was gunned down in a drive-by shooting in Las Vegas. Two years earlier, Tupac had survived a similar attempt on his life and made it publicly known he believed his friend-turned-rival Biggie Smalls had hired the gang, the Crips, to murder him.
Six months after Tupac’s murder, Biggie, 24, was gunned down in Los Angeles, in yet another mysterious celebrity death that remains unexplained. Some believe Tupac’s record label paid to have Biggie killed. But beyond rumors, there were no solid leads for decades.
In 2023, a man named Duanne Keffe D. Davis was arrested and charged with murder. Prosecutors say he’s behind the drive-by that killed Tupac, but the defense claims Davis wasn’t even in Las Vegas at the time. The trial has been pushed to February 2026, and Davis has pleaded not guilty. Until then, the rap icons’ murders remain unsolved.
JonBenét Ramsey
The day after Christmas in 1996, Patsy Ramsey awoke to find her 6-year-old daughter, JonBenét, missing from her bed. In her place: a ransom note demanding $118,000. Later that day, JonBenét’s father, John, discovered his daughter’s body in their basement. She’d been strangled and beaten to death.
Investigators immediately suspected John, Patsy and JonBenét’s half-brother, Burke. The public piled on, especially when it came to Patsy, who had entered JonBenét into child beauty pageants and was reviled for her ruthless “pageant mom” behavior.
Ultimately, more than 1,600 people were named as persons of interest. The crime remains unsolved, however, in part because of procedural errors, including the loss and contamination of evidence, the sharing of evidence with the Ramsey family and a delay in formally interviewing John and Patsy. Now, the daughter of one of the recently deceased investigators has expressed her determination to solve the case.
The Gardner Museum heist
Just because a case doesn’t involve murder doesn’t mean the stakes can’t be ridiculously high. Consider, for example, the Gardner Museum Heist, which involved the theft of 13 paintings by renowned artists, including Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas, Johannes Vermeer and Rembrandt, from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
The paintings, valued in today’s dollars at $500 million, were stolen right out of their frames during the wee hours of March 18, 1990, by two unarmed men dressed as policemen. They entered the museum, subdued the on-duty security guards and left with the paintings, all in under 81 minutes.
Making this strange, unsolved art mystery almost impossible to crack is the fact that no one appears to have ever attempted to sell the stolen paintings. Nor has anyone come forward to claim the $10 million reward offered for the paintings’ return.
Despite an ongoing investigation, the case of the missing paintings grows colder by the day. Thirty-five years after the heist, you can visit the museum to see the empty frames where the stolen masterpieces once hung.
FAQs
What techniques do investigators use today to try to solve cold cases?
Investigators use decades-old evidence and contemporary investigative methods to attempt to solve cold cases. According to the National Institute of Justice, forensic testing, or DNA analysis, is one of the most important tools because it helps detectives analyze evidence that was not available in the past.
Are there any famous cold cases that were recently solved after decades?
Thanks to DNA testing, investigators discovered the identity of the 1957 “boy in the box.” While the evidence didn’t solve this famous cold case (the murderer is still unknown), it provided some closure as the boy’s name, Joseph Augustus Zarelli, was engraved on his headstone.
What are some common reasons why cold cases remain unsolved?
Cases go cold for various reasons, including missing evidence, an absence of leads or suspects, procedural errors and/or mysterious circumstances surrounding the case. Time constraints and a lack of police resources could also contribute to cases going cold.
Although modern technology like video recording and discoveries like DNA evidence give investigators a better chance of solving today’s mysteries, 63% of the violent crimes reported to police in the United States still remain unsolved, per data from the Justice Center of the Council of State Governments.
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Sources:
- Smithsonian Magazine: “Edgar Allan Poe Tried and Failed to Crack the Mysterious Murder Case of Mary Rogers”
- CBS News: “Jack the Ripper victim’s relative demands new inquest after possible DNA breakthrough”
- The Independent: “Black Dahlia: the unsolved murder that transfixed Los Angeles”
- Smithsonian Magazine: “The Enduring Mystery of the Somerton Man, One of Australia’s Most Puzzling Cold Cases”
- BBC: “Mystery of Australia’s ‘Somerton Man’ solved after 70 years, researcher says”
- Case Western Reserve University: “Sheppard Murder Case”
- American Hauntings: “The Boy in the Box”
- Investigation Discovery: “Did The Notorious ‘In Cold Blood’ Killers Murder A Second Family In Florida?”
- FBI: “D.B. Cooper Hijacking”
- The Washington Post: “He died claiming to be a disabled veteran, many believe he was hijacker D.B. Cooper”
- BBC World: “Death in Ice Valley”
- The Independent: “Jimmy Hoffa’s body may have been found by dog called Moxy, cold case investigators claim”
- The New York Times: “How an Unsolved Mystery Changed the Way We Take Pills”
- People: “Who Killed Amber Hagerman? What We Know About the Still-Unsolved Case That Inspired AMBER Alerts”
- ABC News: “Trial for Tupac Shakur murder suspect postponed nearly a year”
- Denver 7: “Daughter of late investigator in JonBenét Ramsey case continues father’s work to solve case”
- Gardner Museum: “The Theft”
- National Institute of Justice: “Applying Modern Investigation Methods to Solve Cold Cases”
- The Council of State Governments: “The Accountability Gap: Unsolved Violent Crime in the United States”
